The popularity of fishing has increased through the years. One common technique of fishing is called “still fishing.” Still fishing often includes use of live bait, such as a worm, night crawler, grub, minnow, crawfish, or others. Still fishing can successful catch fish such as smaller fresh water pan fish including blue gill, crappie, and perch using a small red worm or a larger night crawler, or alternative larger predator fish such as a black, brown, spotted, or striper bass, trout, or other game fish using the same or larger live or even dead baits. As an example, the worm or crawler is commonly attached to a small barbed hook, which is attached to a light line on a fishing pole. The fishing pole is often light and coupled to an open face spinning reel spooled with the light line. The pole and reel was used to cast the worm into a body of water, such as a lake, stream, river, or pond, which hopefully had some fishing to be caught. The terms “still fishing’ literally describe the fisherman's technique of waiting for the fish to strike the worm or other live bait. Although highly successful, other techniques have also been developed.
Artificial lures have been developed to entice a fish to strike using various casting and spinning techniques. Artificial lures include spoons and spinners, minnow like plugs and crank baits, spinner baits and chatter baits, jigs and soft plastics, including worms, creatures, and crawdads, and most recently swim baits from the Golden State of California. Each of these baits is designed to imitate a bait such as a worm, injured minnow, or others. Often times, a fishing angle would make countless casts using high precision casting and/or spinning reels configured on high quality graphite fishing rods.
As the popularity of fishing increased, organized groups such as the Bass Angler's Sportsman Society, commonly called “BASS,” promoted major bass fishing tournaments. Such tournaments hosted the world's best bass anglers in popular lakes and rivers throughout the country. Such anglers' used advanced reels, rods, and lures in an attempt to catch the heaviest stringer of the prized bass-often large mouth bass or black bass. Advanced fishing techniques also were developed to catch these black bass.